The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

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HERE AT THE DAWN of the third millennium C.E., we don’t like to think about actually fighting wars. We hope we’ve outgrown them. For more than half a century, we’ve had the chance to wreck our civilization, and we haven’t taken it. This says something good about us as a species, maybe even something surprisingly good. Perhaps—just perhaps—we aren’t really so stupid as we often give signs of being.

Mankind has always hated war. And yet, it has always fascinated us, too. As long as we’ve written, we’ve written about it. This is quite literally true. The Epic of Gilgamesh goes back to the earliest days of our literacy and is, among other things, the story of warfare. The Iliad, the foundation stone of all Greek literature, centers on the siege of Troy and the great struggle between Akhilleus and Hektor. The Aeneid, Beowulf, the Norse sagas, the Chanson de Roland…all stories of battle, of warriors. And we’re still writing fiction about war, in and out of science fiction, to this day.

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